Deliberative Integrity: Risks and Responses in Mini-Public Governance

Deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) refer to forums for informed citizen deliberation, where participants are everyday people selected through sortition or some form of random selection. Over the past decade, this form of deliberative engagement has gained traction in OECD countries because it promises to generate common ground on divisive issues such as abortion, assisted dying, and climate change.
As DMPs grow in popularity, questions about their integrity are increasingly placed under the spotlight. In this report, we present findings from our research based on 62 semi-structured interviews with the DMPs community of practice from around the world, which includes people who commissioned, designed, implemented, evaluated, provided advice, or served as advocates of DMPs. We use the term ‘deliberative integrity’ to refer to how well the administration or governance of a DMP adheres to the principles of deliberative democracy as conceived by our interviewees.
This report finds that risks to deliberative integrity occur within the deliberative process and in the surrounding commissioning and implementation context. They appear before, during and after the process. The community of practice identified five risk areas in DMPs. These include (1) economic pressures, (2) control and constraint by commissioning authorities (3) orthodoxy of design, (4) poor governance of DMPs, and (5) ambiguous impact and integration into the political system. These risks intersect and are experienced in different ways. When left unaddressed, DMPs are at risk of being diminished as another form of citizen engagement instrumentalised for political or commercial gain. The community of practice has responded to these risks in various forms, involving various actors. Responses take place within the (1) design and implementation of the mini-public, (2) deliberative mini-public community, and (3) broader political system and institutions.
Our aim in sharing these findings is to encourage the community to continue honest and reflexive conversations about the challenges DMPs face. Our findings raise some difficult questions, but we hope to provide an evidence-based foundation for further reflection and action on how to acknowledge and address the risks as the field further matures.